Visual mapping techniques developed by consultants Fintecs have enabled
Oxford Entrepreneurs to document its structure and business processes both to
manage exceptionally rapid organisational change and to transfer knowledge
from generation to generation.

Imagine starting a new business knowing that every single manager and
member of staff must leave the organisation within a year or two to be
replaced by new staff with no previous knowledge or experience. How do you
ensure the organisation can continue to survive? How do you transfer knowledge
from older to newer staff? How do you ensure that everyone still knows what
the organisation is trying to achieve, or even knows what they are supposed to
be doing as individuals?

This was the dramatic challenge facing Oxford student Bob Goodson when he
set up Oxford Entrepreneurs in 2003.

Oxford Entrepreneurs was founded as an Oxford University Society to encourage and
support student entrepreneurship by providing inspiration, education,
networking and the chance to ‘learn by doing’ at the University and
beyond. The society organises guest speakers, practical workshops by leading
business practitioners and social networking events.

The society’s website www.bouncewithit.com
provides resources for young entrepreneurs that include business fact sheets,
a synergy database of members profiles and business competitions such as ‘Idea
Idol’.

In little more than two years, the Society has been a runaway success,
signing up more than 1,800 members and attracting speakers such as James
Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, Anita Roddick, founder of Bodyshop, and Karan
Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer. It has been replicated at other
universities, including LSE and King’s College, London, and now numbers many
members from outside universities.

But there was a problem built into the venture. Bob Goodson knew that he
and all his colleagues running the society would be leaving university in a
year or two. In Bob’s case it proved to be even sooner because he was
headhunted by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin to help start consumer technology
companies at his San Francisco incubator, Midtown Doornail. Bob was wanted in
the US in only three months time.

Says Bob Goodson, ‘I was very aware that I would shortly be leaving
university and so I wanted to make sure the club didn’t simply die when I
left. I wanted to find a way of perpetuating the organisation even when I was
no longer there. The question was, how do you keep something alive over a long
period when everyone who is involved with it will be leaving within one or at
most two years?

It was a problem that had interested Bob even before joining Oxford, when
he had been a student at University of East Anglia. ‘The idea hadn’t at
that stage taken a visual form,’ says Bob, ‘but I knew it would involve
becoming process-oriented and I had begun to put pen to paper to depict the
processes that the Society involved.’

It was at this point that Bob met Tony Gratton, whose consultancy company,
Fintecs, has since 2001 been pioneering the idea of visually mapping the
processes and interactions that go to make up any complex organisation or
system.

Goodson recalls, ‘Tony helped me to identify the main elements of Oxford
Entrepreneurs and we found that central to the whole organisation is Drive. If
you can envision and distil into a very small message what you’re trying to
do with the project and make that a controlling vision, then you have captured
the essence of the organisation. It’s got to be a message that everyone can
believe in and then you have to set up a dynamic that gets the best people
into the team and motivates them to succeed in that vision. That’s what Tony
and I termed Drive. It’s the notion of where the central dynamic of the
organisation is and it’s here that most student business start-ups fail. So
the central dynamic is to set up a situation where you can attract the best
and most ambitious people and reward them really well for doing a good job so
that their interest remains alive. It sounds very straightforward but it’s
really quite difficult to implement in a start-up situation.’

‘Why should a student society need to document itself in this way when
even a lot of big companies don’t?’ Asks Bob Goodson. ‘As part of the
society’s vision and drive it has been invaluable. The map is prominently
displayed in our office where everyone can see it and consult it. Whenever we
have a meeting where a process question comes up, the answer is very clear
because it’s written up there on the wall!’

Another important reason for documenting the organisation visually was that
it had proved so successful it was going to be replicated by other
universities including Oxford Brooks, London School of Economics and Imperial
College, London. ‘Those groups, says Bob Goodson, ‘were essentially set up
using a copy of the Fintecs visual process map and a few calls from us at
Oxford.’

Above all, the Fintecs visual map has proved successful in its primary role
of transferring knowledge between one generation of students and the next.
Oxford Entrepreneurs current president, and Bob Goodson’s successor, is
Kirill Makharinsky.

‘The biggest benefit of Oxford Entrepreneurs as a society, says Kirill,
‘is that you can meet the kind of people that you’ll need to turn your
idea into reality. A good idea doesn’t necessarily turn into a good company
by any means, especially if you’re also studying full time. Essentially we
provide the tools online and offline to search for team members. For example,
we have a couple of recent ventures, www.amiworthit.com
and www.liveout.co.uk , which were
both formed using our synergy database where members found others based on the
skills they needed.’

‘The idea of visual mapping came up,’ says Kirill, ‘because we needed
to be able to convey both to our committee internally and to external
supporters, exactly what we do. You know, a picture is worth a thousand words,
especially at an early stage in your development. We found it was an
invaluable way of putting across to people in only five minutes what it is we
do. We found it particularly useful to show external parties and sponsors
exactly what we do in a short space of time – to show them exactly how the
organisation is structured.’

‘When it comes to getting our point across quickly it’s absolutely
fantastic. We’ve used it often for external presentations and every single
time we’ve had incredible feedback from external parties – after seeing it
they certainly felt that we know what we’re doing and could see exactly what
we’re trying to do in the future as well.’

Oxford Entrepreneurs has inevitably grown and changed over the two years
since its founding but visual mapping has proved easy to adapt to those
changes. Says Kirill, ‘I was involved in updating the map with Fintecs and
the changes conveyed the transition perfectly, to my mind. We really didn’t
have to amend much and I was very happy with the end result.’

‘Visual mapping is important because it’s essential to make sure that
every single team member knows exactly where they’re going. Having that
process shown visually can help clarify that and explain it. Having a visual
tool is valuable because no one except for a very serious investor is going to
sit down and read a full length business plan, and it would be impossible to
convey really accurately and dramatically the organisation in only five
minutes without such a tool.’

Bob Goodson echoes this view. ‘Why use visual documentation rather than
traditional text documents? There’s no comparison. You can represent far
more information in a much smaller space – you can represent a whole range
of relationships that would take a very large amount of conventional text -- I
would guess that you would be looking at probably 200 pages of text to
represent everything that the Fintecs visual map shows in a single document.’

About Fintecs

Founded in 2001, Fintecs is a Banking IT consultancy that combines in-depth
expertise in Banking and the Financial industry with a unique approach to the
visual documentation of systems, business processes and people.

The Fintecs visual approach to IT documentation has been developed in
association with one of Europe’s leading banks. It is designed to help
financial institutions of all kinds to rediscover the value of their hardware
and software assets and to:-

· Transfer vital knowledge among staff
· Match IT systems more closely to the needs of Business
· Understand fully how business processes interact
· Plan future systems with confidence

Fintecs draws on a wealth of experience with all kinds of financial
institutions from private banking to trust administration including
specialities such as asset management for private and institutional clients.
Fintecs has carried out consultancy projects in countries throughout Europe as
well as in Canada. Staff are English-French bilingual and have extensive
experience of the Swiss banking system.

Fintecs consultancy work has included business process analysis from
front-office to back, data flows, databases and a wide range of software
applications, with extensive experience of Project Management, Project
Implementation, Systems Integration, and Systems Replacement.